The article links to the help page for the feature: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12315692. It seems likely that it'd be a lot better at answering your questions than looking at screenshots.
> They also said they will only be adding an audit trail later this year. This is really sketchy because I believe it means you, nor anybody else can actually verify if it has been signed.
From the help page it seems obvious that both the sender and signers are able to check whether the contract has been signed. "1. Open the respective PDF file in Drive or through the link in the email notification. 2. Click View details in the upper right corner of the PDF to open the right side panel and view eSignature details."
Are you saying that the only possible valid implementation of an audit log is one appended to the contract pdf?
> Can Google not send people a simple email with a link?
Obviously they could. But equally obviously from your description, this is not a feature where sending one email with one link is sufficient. Based on the help page the final signed contract is "saved in your Drive", an operation that's not meaningful for a random email address that won't have an associated Google Drive. It seems likely that this is a feature that would be blocked on e.g. embedding the audit log in the pdf as per the discussion above.
> > Can Google not send people a simple email with a link?
> Obviously they could. But equally obviously from your description, this is not a feature where sending one email with one link is sufficient. Based on the help page the final signed contract is "saved in your Drive", an operation that's not meaningful for a random email address that won't have an associated Google Drive. It seems likely that this is a feature that would be blocked on e.g. embedding the audit log in the pdf as per the discussion above.
None of this really matters. I totally agree with the parent comment: having an e-signature product that is only usable by other Gmail users (and of course their is really no way to know if any particular email address is a Gmail user) makes it useless. What, so if I need some docs signed I'll get half of them signed with DocuSign and the other half with Docs? Of course not, I'll just use the product that works with anyone.
Google used to have this same "can only share docs with other Drive users" feature, though it's improved somewhat. In general I think the enterprise doc sharing features are so bad in Drive that the only way I can wrap my head around it is to think that Google is scared of antitrust concerns if they too closely tried to emulate features from the likes of Dropbox, Box and others.
> They also said they will only be adding an audit trail later this year. This is really sketchy because I believe it means you, nor anybody else can actually verify if it has been signed.
From the help page it seems obvious that both the sender and signers are able to check whether the contract has been signed. "1. Open the respective PDF file in Drive or through the link in the email notification. 2. Click View details in the upper right corner of the PDF to open the right side panel and view eSignature details."
Are you saying that the only possible valid implementation of an audit log is one appended to the contract pdf?
> Can Google not send people a simple email with a link?
Obviously they could. But equally obviously from your description, this is not a feature where sending one email with one link is sufficient. Based on the help page the final signed contract is "saved in your Drive", an operation that's not meaningful for a random email address that won't have an associated Google Drive. It seems likely that this is a feature that would be blocked on e.g. embedding the audit log in the pdf as per the discussion above.